The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive contains scans of original documents including a card index to his original notebooks, biographical (from his wife) and autobiographical material, a complete collection of aphorisms, a note on the 2004 Ashby Centenary Conference at University of Illinois, Urbana and some letters. The grand children who brought this project to fruition are to be congratulated on producing a standard setting archive site.

We reproduce below some 50 of aphorisms which first appeared in
Ashby's writings on Cybernetics "Mechanisms of
Intelligence" Intersystems Publications 1981 edited
by Roger Conant ISBN 1127197703

Thanks to the Ashby family for letting us extend
this collection three times to more than 150 aphorisms, many of Theorem status.
The Ross Ashby
site continues to be extended.

Some 25 notebooks, autobiographical writing and other
material are available at the British Library.

The famous Law of Requisite Variety is usually
stated "Variety absorbs Variety" but in his
"Introduction
to Cybernetics" (now available on line at
Principia
Cybernetica) he states it "picturesquely":
"only variety in R can force down variety due to D;
only variety can destroy variety" (p.207). R
and D are regarded here as players in a game but
often R is a regulator and D a disturbance in Ashby's
approach.

This was extended with Roger Conant (Int. J. Systems Sci.,1970 Vol.1, No. 2, 89-97) in the famous theorem "Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system". If a table is to persist, for example, it must contain a model of itself. This dynamic model is produced by the form of the object and its accumulated internal stresses and strains.

Dr Horace Townsend has made a Java applet
simultation of Ashby's Homeostat
with a virtual four pen chart recorder. This is not a
concurrent machine but doubtless will evoke the
character of this object still central to our
understanding of the wide applicability of the
Cybernetic Approach.

What Ashby Says...

On Science

Science is the Observer's Digest.

The Cyberneticist observes what might have
happened but did not.

A System is a set of variables sufficiently
isolated to stay constant long enough for us to
discuss it.

On Man

Division of the world's system into Natural and
Man-made died with Darwin.

Man is not the measure: first comes the
measure, then we see where he falls; so far the
result has always been humiliating.

Man pays for his knowledge with humiliation.

On Self Repair

The fault cannot be in the part responsible for
the repair.

On Creativity

The scientist does not believe in events
without causes, not even when they happen in the
brain.

Introspection is the output of the verbalising
mechanism.

On Evolution

By the time sexual reproduction has been
achieved, the main difficulty of evolution is
past.

The brain is merely Nature's latest means of
self-preservation.

The goals of a species, such as Homo, are what
natural selection has driven it to.

The species is fundamentally aimless (it finds
its goals as it goes along).

On Goals

The goals in evolution are what a species has
been forced to.

On Essential Variables

Poor M. Jourdain! He now has to understand that
he has been behaving homeostatically all his life,
when he thought he was merely minding his business.

On Psychology

For two thousand years psychology was a simple
description of Man's highest faculties--most of
which he does not posses.

The scientist does not believe in effects
without causes, not even when they happen in the
brain.

On Introspection

That homo has a brain, no more entitles him to
assume he knows how he thinks than possession of a
liver entitles him to assume that he knows how he
metabolises.

A man no more knows how he thinks, just because
he has a brain in his skull, than he knows how he
makes blood, because he has marrow in his bones.

On The Brain

The brain is natures latest and ferocious
instrument of self preservation.

Remember: The brain has no brain inside to
guide it.

On Thinking

To think is to act--inside the brain.

On the Brain as controller

The brain controls nothing--it transmits.

On Organisation in the Brain

The brain organizes nothing--it acts.

The brain has no gimmick, just five billion
years of research and development.

The brain knows nothing of how it ought to act
it knows only what it does.

On long-term planning in the brain: Man's
ability to plan

The brain is wholly opportunist, no less when
it proposes a long term plan.

On Progress in adaptation

A brain can improve till it fits in its
environment.

On Organisation

Organisation exists mostly in the eye of the
beholder.

On Memory

The brain knows only the present and what it
can construct from the present.

Man lives by surviving.

Which showed the best power of survival when
attacked by the Spaniards: that bio-organisation
calle the Amazon jungle: or that bio-organisation
called the Aztecs?

Which out-fought the Spaniards - the Aztec
civil organisation, or that bio-organisation called
the Amazon Jungle ?

The digital computer of today is like a
centipede with a million legs, each of which can go
forward in a microsecond but as it can move only
one pair at a time the whole animal is easily
outrun by the tortoise

When we take the ordinates of a wave function
and use them to compute their exact values a moment
later, we are (1) demonstrating that the science of
quantum physics use determinate systems. (2)
treats the system as determinate.

Every operation seeks the state that makes it
impotent.

A "machine" is a shadow of simple
succession.

"The time it takes increases exponentially" is
a mathematical way of saying it can't be done.

On Sympathy

If my sympathy with another's sufferings proves
the reality of the other's feelings then the
pattern of light and shade that I call a "weeping
heroine" on the cinema screen is genuinely feeling.

On Introspection

A man can report what happens in his brain only
so far as the events reach the verbalising
center.

Every dramatist knows the inexorable logic of
the emotions.

Disorder never proceeds to order so milk can
never separate into buttermilk and cream.

On the subjective

How to test whether you're dreaming - kick the
fellow in front of you and see who feels the
pain.

I am therefore I think.

On error controlled servo

The error controlled servo - mechanism is a
brain without eyes.

Whatever vibrates is a musical instrument:
whatever is stable is a mechanical brain - the
difficulty lies in making a particular one.

Is your life achieving the full potentialities
of carbon ?

NOTES.
John Ashby writes "Some checking remains to be
completed". The source is Ross Ashby's hand-written
card index. Some ambiguities and near duplicates remain.